Brenda Murphy, PhD

Clinical Human Cytogenetics & Molecular Genetics

My research interest lies in the cytogenetic, molecular genetic and biochemical genetic diagnosis of human genetic diseases. I am especially interested in genotype/epigenotype-phenotype correlations for clinical diagnostic purposes. At the beginning of my genetic career I worked at the local hospital in both the Cytogenetic and the Molecular Diagnositic laboratories for ~15 years. When I moved to Western I expanded upon this knowledge by studying genetically identical twins discordant for disorders that are genetically more complex and have an interaction with environmental factors. In addition, I am interested in chimpanzee comparative genomics, schizophrenia, cancer (breast cancer, colon cancer and leukemia), epigenomics, imprinting, pharmacogenomics, immunogenomics, human development, teratogens, prenatal diagnosis, nurigenomics, genome structure (telomeres, subtelomeres, centromeres, low copy repeats, copy number variation, chromosome breakpoints, unbalanced chromosome rearrangements), microarray meta-analysis, comparative genomic hybridizaton assays , next generation sequencing techniques and bioinformatics.